A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist (19 page)
Read A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist Online
Authors: Ron Miller
Bronwyn felt as though she had spent years as a foundering ship, wrecked upon some black and forgotten reef. Then Gyven had offered her a tenuous escape, a fragile line that, like a spider’s web, attached her sinking life to his soaring one.
Now she wondered:
Did I panic? Did I so desperately want to be rescued that I broke that fragile link? Did I pull him toward me so hard that I lost him?
She blinked and realised that pink moonlight was washing over her skin, making it seem to fluoresce like margarine under an ultraviolet ray. She looked down into the caldera; the buildings were still lit, but there were no figures moving anywhere. She stood carefully, cold, kinks, abused muscles and pinched nerves making the progress unsteady and painful. She stretched and bent, working out the worst of the knots, warming congealed muscles, and began to search for a path that was both direct and sheltered from view. She wanted to remain out of line of sight from the caldera floor because she felt that she was indeed as luminous as a bar of white-hot iron, and, in truth, her milky figure against the black lava was like a shimmering aurora, noctilucent cloud or meteor trail. The same moonlight, she discovered, illuminated the rocks almost as brightly as day, but the shadows between them were a deep, violet-tinted black that hid who knew what pitfalls and princess-devouring crevices. Her progess was steady but painfully slow and the moon had passed the zenith before she finally reached the corrugated floor of the crater. The nearest of the buildings was a rough-looking shed not more than a hundred yards distant. There was, she was pleased to see, no sign of light in its single window. Feeling as obvious as a will-o’-the-wisp, and looking very much like one, she made a dash for the shack, her panic at the possibility of discovery anesthetizing the pain in the soles of her feet as they pounded over the sharp volcanic ash.
She arrived at the rear wall of the shed breathless and dizzy, her heart beating like a trip hammer. She pressed her hand against her breast and tried to regain a little composure, or as much as one could naked in the middle of a volcano. Peering around the nearest corner she saw no one, though there were moving shadows in nearby windows. Slinking around to the front, she was pleased and relieved to find that the door was unlocked, in fact, unequipped with lock or latch of any kind, no doubt a measure of Tudela’s self-assurance. Enough light drifted through the single window to show Bronwyn that the shed was only used for storage. A moment’s rummaging found a pair of overalls that did not fit her badly, giving her yet one more reason to be grateful for her height, though the garment was intended for someone of at least twice her girth. She winced, and almost cried out, at the touch of the rough fabric against her sunburned skin. There was, unfortunately, nothing at all with which she could cover her feet. She did find a number of tools, all which could be pressed into service as weapons, though none were as obviously suitable as a knife would have been. The overalls’ pockets were capacious and she took a heavy mallet, a chisel and an awl.
The next thing she needed to find was Professor Wittenoom. Out of a dozen buildings, eleven, since she could eliminate the one she had just looted, he could be in any one. She took a moment to think about this. Wittenoom had told her that Tudela had given him the freedom of the island, such as that was. That would seem to mean that the professor was probably not confined to any specially secure quarters. On the other hand, Tudela would hardly expect the professor to bunk with the laborers and assistants. Since Wittenoom was apparently the only other scientist on the island, and as such the only one with whom the doctor could intelligently communicate his ideas,
gloat, that is,
amended Bronwyn, it did not strain belief that Tudela might expect Wittenoom to be his personal guest. If she assumed that, then it became a matter of trying to decide which of the buildings might most likely be the doctor’s own. She eliminated the stone blockhouse. It was lightless and looked far too functional. Of the other larger structures, one had rows of identical windows, all brightly lit, which, added to the sounds coming from it, convinced her that it was a common dormitory. Another was virtually windowless and was most likely a storeroom or warehouse. The third large building was very house-like and, even more to the point, was surrounded by a low fence. Two front ground floor windows were lit as was one upstairs window. This house, however, was on the far side of the camp, almost opposite from where she was now hidden. To get to it she would have to either cut a chord directly across the arcing line of buildings, or follow the outside of the curve. She was incredibly tired and hungry and footsore, so she chose the former course as being at the same time the boldest and the quickest. Walking as steadily and assuredly as she could manage, she set out across the compound, keeping her pace determined and her eyes fixed on the house.
She was two thirds of the way to her goal when she was challenged.
“Hey! Hey, you!” cried a slurred voice. She did not slacken her pace. “Hey you! Wait up!” came the same voice and this time she heard the crunch of unsteady footsteps behind her. Still she neither slowed nor looked back. Nevertheless, her heart was racing like an ungoverned motor and perspiration began to pour down the length of her body. She thought she might faint when the footsteps came to within inches of her back and a hand fell onto her shoulder. “Whassa matta wit’ ya? Coon’t ya hear me?”
She took a deep breath that failed to steady her nerves, and turned around. She found herself looking into a face that the nascent moonlight only managed to make even more corpse-like than it must have looked when fully lit.
“C’m on an’ havva beer . . . who th’ hell are
you?
” the face asked in an exhalation of overripe alcohol and the answer it received, as inadequate as it must have seemed, was a mallet in the middle of the forehead.
Mollified and somewhat heartened by the satisfactorily resonant
bonk
the blow made, Bronwyn turned and continued on her way, completing the remaining third of the distance to the house without further interruption.
The house was incongruously homely, with a picket fence, neat clapboarding, stone chimney, tiled roof and shuttered windows equipped with window boxes in which a few cacti struggled. There was a single lit window on the ground floor front and one on the second floor. Bronwyn reasoned that if Tudela and Wittenoom were sharing the house, then it would be most likely that it were the former who had remained awake, perhaps working, and the latter, as the guest, who had retired to his room. If so, all she needed to do was find a way of contacting the professor and letting him know of her presence. But how? There was no fire escape, no tree conveniently growing near the window, no downspout (scarcely necessary in a place where if it rained at all it rained volcanic ash): only overlapping clapboards that would give no purchase to fingers and toes.
Do I dare,
she wondered,
try to enter the place surreptitiously?
The thought alone made her feel ill, but she could see no other way. Half in the hope that she would find no rear entrance, she cautiously circled the house and found that there was, indeed, a small porch and door, no doubt the entrance to the kitchen. Neither the screened door nor the door beyond were locked, which did not surprise Bronwyn at all. The door, to her great relief, swung silently on well-oiled hinges, revealing a darkened room beyond that proved to be, as she had suspected, a kitchen. Her nose reared like a starved horse catching the scent of a bag of oats, she almost expected it to whinny. She had not eaten for, so far as she knew, at least eighteen hours and even then it was only the handful of mussels she had devoured at the beach. She reasoned that it would make no sense to try to continue any further without sustenance, especially when food was so close at hand, an argument made even more pertinent when she reminded herself that she had no idea whatsoever what the future, immediate or otherwise, held. By the time all of this rationalization had been accomplished, her eyes, already accustomed to the semidarkness outside, had adjusted themselves and the kitchen’s furnishings materialized out of the gloom like ghosts. Padding silently on bare feet, Bronwyn gingerly explored cabinets, cupboards and, she was delighted to discover, a mechanical icebox. From the latter she removed a jug of milk (which proved to have been reconstituted from powder), half a roast chicken, some soft cheese and a covered bowl of stewed prunes. She wondered if Doctor Tudela might be constipated. In a tin box atop the refrigerator was a quarter loaf of bread. She ate as quietly as her ravenous appetite allowed her. There was still no sound from the rest of the house except for, as she now noticed, a faint, regular squeaking from overhead, as if from someone slowly pacing a room. This convinced her that her original deduction had been correct: Tudela was the least nervous person she had ever met and she could not imagine him pacing for any reason. The upstairs occupant must in fact be Wittenoom.
Three doors exited the kitchen: one was that by which she had entered. Another, she discovered by gingerly opening it half an inch, revealed only a pantry. The third door, which was hung on swinging hinges, opened onto a hallway. The far end was illuminated by light spilling from an open doorway, while a flight of stairs ascended halfway between. Bronwyn swallowed, though quietly. In order to reach the stairs she would have to approach within a few feet of the room in which she was certain Tudela was sitting and, for all she knew, as alert as a cat.
Slipping through the narrow opening, afraid to swing the door any further for fear of a suddenly squeaky hinge, she pressed her hands against the door and took several long seconds to allow it to soundlessly swing closed. She paused, as alert as the tremulous gazelle, but there was not a sound from the front room. Her heart was racing, adrenalin acted upon her metabolism like resin in a steam-boiler’s firebox and her oxygen-starved body was making her breath come in short, sharp gasps that she tried desperately to suppress, replacing her fear of discovery with an even worse fear of passing out. She took only one short step at a time, listening carefully between each movement, placing her foot onto the uncarpeted floor as gently as a stalking kitten. As yet unnoticed, after a subjective hour or so, she placed her first step on the bottom riser of the stairs. She took a moment, now that she was out of direct sight of anyone standing in the doorway of the front room, to wipe away the flood of perspiration that was sheeting her face, stinging her eyes. Now came the second stage: stairs, which she knew were traditionally and notoriously noisy. Keeping as close to the wall as she could, so that she would be placing her weight on the most secure part of each step, she ascended with nerve-wracking deliberation.
She reached the upper landing with a sense of physical exhaustion that left her feeling drained and almost swooning. There, however, not ten feet from where she stood, was a closed door with yellow light fanning from a gap at its base. Cautioning herself not to abandon her guard, she approached the silent room as though it contained her mortal enemy, rather than a friend. Standing before the unpainted panel, she was not certain what to do next. Knock? Rather than think overmuch about it, she grasped the brass knob, turned it and entered the room.
It was sparsely, but not by any means shabbily, furnished. The walls were papered, if plainly, relieved by a few framed prints; a circular rug covered the floor almost wall to wall; there was a large bed with carved head- and footboards; an amply upholstered easy chair; an overbrimming bookcase; a secretary and a plain wooden chair and in the chair leaning over a sheaf of papers on the desk of the secretary was a tall, black-clad man who turned and regarded her unexpected appearance with no surprise whatsoever.
“Good evening, Princess,” he greeted.
“Good evening, Doctor Tudela,” was all that she could think to say.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CATMEN & CONTINENTS
If Tudela had been surprised at the sudden appearance of Princess Bronwyn Tedeschiiy out of an uninhabited and virtually uninhabitable wilderness, after she had been missing for weeks, he failed to show it. He only asked where she had been and her answer, “Lost”, seemed to satisfy him. Perhaps under ordinary circumstances, in fact, almost certainly, he would have questioned both the un-likeliness of the event as well as the uninformativeness of her reply. As it was, even the vast mind of Dr. Tudela had found itself over-preoccupied by the almost infinitely recomplicated details of his Great Project. He accepted Bronwyn’s presence as though she had always been there. He directed that a room be prepared for her in his own house, a room adjoining the professor’s she was glad to see, as well as clean clothing (including, she was also glad to see, socks and shoes), and then proceeded to ignore her.
“What in the world is going on here?” she demanded of Wittenoom, the moment she was left alone with him. “What in the world is Tudela
doing
on this island?”
“That’s easy enough to tell. He’s planning to make the smaller moon drop to the earth.”
“What? How? Why?”
“‘How’ is a little past my understanding, electrical phenomena being outside my field, as you know. ‘Why’ is a simpler matter. He’s being paid to do it.”
“Paid? Paid by whom? And that still leaves open the question of ‘why.’
Why
would anyone, Tudela or otherwise, want to drop the moon onto the earth? It’s the stupidest thing that I’ve ever heard of.”
“Perhaps. I don’t know. But every time the smaller moon passes through the zenith, he gives it a nudge with his machinery and it drops just a little closer.”
“But that’s madness. You told me yourself that it’d mean eleventy squillion tons of rock smacking onto our heads.”
“True. But I think that neither Tudela nor his sponsors care much about that. In fact, I believe that is exactly what is supposed to happen. That is, eleventy squillion tons of rock smacking onto our heads, to use your graphic phraseology.”
“But why?”
“I’ve no idea. It seems extremely malicious. Tudela’s always been an un-likeable man, but I wouldn’t have suspected this of him. It must be someone else’s idea.”
“Did Tudela have anything to do with Hughenden’s attempt to maroon us?”
“You’d have to ask him that, but I’d be inclined to think so.”
“So would I.”
Tudela joined them at breakfast the next morning, where, perhaps because he was under too much of a strain to maintain his usual aloofness, he was far more personable than the evening before and even became absolutely conversational, if not particularly informative. He had changed little since Bronwyn had visited him in his Academy laboratory: still tall and exceedingly lean, with glossy black hair, moustache and imperial. His skin was still excessively pale, with the unnatural whiteness of bleached paper, on which his dark features looked like blots of ink. His fingers were long and flexible and always gloved.
“The food is simple,” he apologized, “but it is nourishing and not, I think, unpalatable. I have come to believe that well-fed people are seldom inclined to cause difficulties. Are you aware of a revolution ever occuring in a country, however bad its régime may have been, that had food enough for its people?”
“I have no doubt that you’re correct, Doctor,” replied Bronwyn. “I certainly have no complaints. Breakfast is delicious. But then, starvation is a wonderful appetizer.”
“Thank you. Unfortunately, there is no work for you to do here, unless you’d care to clean up the bloody footprints you have left all over my house. My servant has complained. Beyond that, I can’t think of any use for you. I have allowed myself exactly that number of technicians that my project requires and no more. And even if I were short-handed, there is nothing that you would be capable of doing, even if you understood what was needed. Please take no offense; the Professor here has a vastly greater scientific education than you, yet he is as a newborn babe in the midst of the work that I have undertaken. It is no fault of his or yours. Feel free, however, to observe all you wish. I only ask that you not interfere.”
“You’re too kind. Would it be possible for you to give me at least the gist of this project of yours? I take it that it’s intimately involved with the future of the small moon?”
“You’re correct, of course. It has everything to do with the small moon.”
“Yes?”
“By means of a technique which I cannot begin to attempt to describe to you here and now, and probably never, I am going to drop the smaller moon onto the earth.”
“But why? I don’t understand what the sense of that would be.”
“Of course you don’t. You haven’t enough information. However, the why of my actions is far simpler to explain than the how.” He leaned back in his chair and dabbed daintily with his napkin at his moustache. He had used a new napkin for each dish he had consumed. Nor had he removed his gloves to eat. Finished, he carefully folded the linen square and placed it atop the others. “I had nearly decided to abandon certain researches that were taking me into fascinating areas, but which were at the same time forbidding my entry for lack of funds to develop and construct the necessary equipment. As you well know, Princess, I require elaborate, precise and unique devices . . . which are by their very nature extraordinarily expensive. There was no way, I knew, that I could convince either the Academy or the government to tender me the enormous sums I knew that I would need. It is one of the tragedies of this imperfect world that genius must be hobbled by ignorance combined with parsimonious purses. Be that as it may, I was one day approached by an individual purporting to represent a, um, consortium which had the means and will to allow me to continue my work on the scale it demanded. My sponsors only required the practical use of it.”
“I take it, then,” asked Bronwyn, “that it’s this consortium that has contracted for the collision of the moon with the earth.”
“Of course.”
“But how could you agree to something like that?”
“What was it to me? They obviously had their reasons and I was convinced that they were good and sufficient. In any case, I established myself here, on this remote island, on the opposite side of the planet from the agreed-upon point of contact.”
Bronwyn tried to recreate a map of the world in her mind, but was not very successful. What was on the other side of the globe from Skupshtina Island? For that matter, where exactly
was
Skupshtina Island?
“But, if you’ll pardon me, Professor Wittenoom told me that the moon was going to fall down here, on this island.”
“That was after I changed my mind.”
“Changed your mind? About what?”
“About some of my goals. This occured after I learned of the composition of the smaller moon.”
“You mean the gold.”
“Yes, of course, but not just the gold alone; in fact, hardly for the gold at all. After all, a moment’s thought should reveal that such a mass of gold would be valueless.”
“Well, that’s true, I suppose. But if not for the gold, what for, then?”
“For the mass itself. If you will excuse me?” he requested, abruptly, rising from the table. “I have much that requires my attention.”
Left alone with the remains of her own breakfast and Professor Wittenoom, Bronwyn was more than ever preoccupied with more than usually morbid thoughts.
Bronwyn discovered that she, like the professor, indeed had the freedom of the island, exactly as promised, such as that freedom was and such as the island was. There were, she quickly found, no boats and had been none for months. Tudela had effectively and efficiently marooned himself and had no intention of leaving, or allowing anyone else to leave, until his project was completed.
The professor showed her the path he was accustomed to taking, that led from the camp to the sea, and even led her down the cliff face to the big rock on which he had been meditating when she had presented herself to him as a mermaid. She was a little disconcerted to discover that by following the meandering stream she had inadvertantly taken the most sesquipedalian route, the professor’s path traversed the same distance in only two or three miles of soft, smooth sand. The island was surrounded by more of the ragged basalt cliffs, -like barriers of shattered black glass, that had so daunted the princess when she had regained her bipedality. Even the rare coves were barracaded from the sea by reefs as treacherous and sharp-toothed as bear traps. She showed the professor the place she had landed and he was appalled at the appearance of the thundering surf and knife--like rocks, to say nothing of the precipitous path she had taken. The tide was high and the little beach was invisible beneath the surging grey water that beat the adamantine black rocks with foamy, impotent fists. Obviously her perspective had changed a great deal since her retransformation and now she could not imagine any reason trenchant enough to convince her to plunge into that surging maelstrom.
The sole practical access to the island, the only passage through the barricading cliffs, was scrupulously guarded twenty-four hours a day. Tudela had, once he had established his camp, stocked supplies for nearly a year and had sent the last boat away with orders not to return until his signal. Once a month a ship would swing out of the lone shipping lane that crossed the Great Sea, heave to for one day within sight of the island and then, if it saw no signal, would proceed upon its way. Bronwyn witnessed one of these vigils as she and the professor strolled along the broken clifftops on the afternoon following her arrival. She saw the ship first and pointed it out to the professor. It was little more than a kind of pimple on the horizon, which Wittenoom told the princess was more than twenty miles away as seen from their lofty vantage point. Bronwyn’s sharp eyes were able to spot the faint plume of smoke from the idling boilers.
“Why don’t we try and signal it?” she asked.
“It’s been tried. One of the workers here couldn’t stand the isolation and ignited a huge bonfire in a grove of dry scrub. The fire and smoke must have been visible for miles, but the ship ignored it. There must be some peculiar, secret signal that will elicit a response, and all others are disregarded. A smoke signal would be, in any case, difficult to distinguish from the natural sources of steam and smoke on a volcanic island.”
“What happened to the worker?”
“What? Oh. I don’t know.”
The princess stared at the distant smudge for a long time afterward, but, try as her brain might, it could not help her, which made it feel bad, and staring into the wind only made her eyes sore and red.
The princess was, so far as she could tell, the only woman on the island. The doctor, she knew from experience, was sexless and therefore her gender gave her no advantage. Nevertheless, Tudela had in the past always treated her civilly, if condescendingly, answering her questions and demonstrating his devices and theories with a cold courtesy and he acted no differently now. Although she knew that he did, in fact, respect her intelligence, perhaps as much or more than many of his colleagues, she also knew that what she was playing upon was the man’s immense ego. As powerful as the man was, he was no more difficult to control than a high-pressure steam engine, which for all of its power could be managed by the lightest touch of even a child’s hand.
The doctor eventually took her on a tour of his facility, with but a single exception not barring her from any of its details. The stone building contained on its ground floor a series of turbine-propelled dynamos. These were half a dozen squat, dull-black, humpbacked objects that closely resembled huge loaves of bread. The thick pipes that emerged from their sides and curved into the floor made them resemble crouching hippopotami, or arthritic buffalo. Steam puffed and hissed from their nostrils as they found their bovine contemplations disturbed by the presence of a stranger. The stone floor quivered with a power that frightened Bronwyn. The machines, the doctor explained, were powered by superheated steam that he easily obtained by drilling into the floor of the caldera. The electrical current produced by the dynamos was carried by six-inch-thick copper busbars to the upper floors of the building where gigantic coils, prepared to his special design, converted the current into a peculiarly powerful form of his unique invention: high-tension current.
Much of Bronwyn’s curiosity was eventually satisfied by recourse to an old and unregenerate habit: she rifled Doctor Tudela’s desk. She had no difficulty whatsoever in picking the lock to the office that adjoined his bedroom suite. The desk within was itself unlocked and, without a moment’s hesitation, she began to pore through its neatly arranged drawers and pigeonholes. She discarded most of what she found, letters, bills and invoices, page after page of incomprehensible calculations, drawings of complex circuits, machinery and devices, until she discovered what appeared, and proved to be, a variety of journal or memorandum-book. She scanned through pages full of the doctor’s closely-written, precise script, her mind open to any telling or significant words or phrases. What eventually caught her eye was not a written entry, but a neatly-drawn map. It was of the world, on Stroonpeen’s projection, showing the familiar cluster of continental masses that traditionally occupied most of the right-hand side, but, in addition, there was an unfamiliar landmass that filled almost the entirety of the Great Sea, an area that she knew was in fact completely unoccupied. This new continent was indicated by a dashed line, giving it a kind of speculative appearance, and enclosed a circular area not much less than three-quarters that of the combined islands and continents of the known world. This circular area was labled Tudeland. At its very center was a small dot with its label, Skupshtina, crossed out.
Bronwyn looked at this map for quite a long time, suspecting it of a special significance, but not quite being able to understand what that might be. Eventually her brow cleared, which always improved her appearance, she habitually scowled far too much, while her face drained of its color, becoming as pallid and unappetizing as a turnip. Quickly searching the desk for some blank paper, she found a sheet of unused onion skin, whose translucency was ideally suited to her needs. Laying this over the page in the journal, she carefully traced the map. Replacing everything as best she could, she closed the desk and retreated from the room, relocking the door behind her.